I know the leftist in me is supposed to have sympathy for these people and get them to unionize. But only after I stop laughing and enjoying this moment. For years these fucks told the rest of us to “learn to code” and pretended like studying anything else at uni was a fucking waste of time.
GUESS WHAT FUCKERS. SO WAS CODING. Looks like we’ll be baristas together, only I’ll have three years of experience!!!
Yes, I have been in software development for close to 15 years and I have never seen it this bad. Everyone seems to mythologize 2008 but I was working age in those years and it is just as bad now as it was then; maybe worse, especially seeing as we weren’t collectively in denial about a plague wiping out millions of the working population at the time. It has been almost 1.5 years since I was furloughed, and I don’t even get calls back anymore. Echoing sentiment elsewhere in this thread that tech workers are an especially clueless bunch as far as class relations, too; I have been attempting to organize for as long as I’ve been in this field and absolutely none of them want it. We had experienced the largest white collar labor leverage in living memory (mandatory remote work) that we just let them take from us because this field is all miserable men who can’t actually stand to be around their families and nonexistent home life. It would be remarkable if it weren’t fucking all of us over, and they all love it. Very bleak.
One point I've seen making that case that it's not as bad as 2008 is that this time companies mostly aren't shutting down, but instead just downsizing. Which is true, but I think part of that is just because the economy is more "consolidated" into large companies than before. Think of the Apple car or Metaverse shutting down and presumably laying off most of the people on those projects; each likely had at least a few hundred employees, which in 2008 could have been entire companies. Or AWS, which most of the western internet runs on at this point, if they layoff 10% of their employees that's potentially thousands of engineers putting pressure on the rest of the tech labor market, yet on the surface it doesn't look that bad since AWS continues to exist and "it's just 10%".